About Garden Project Academy
Hi! I'm Eve Hanlin
I help new and experienced gardeners plan and design their successful gardening projects.
I'm a landscape designer and certified horticulturist from the Pacific Northwest corner of the USA.
I've been teaching local classes and offering landscape design services for years, and am excited to now be creating online resources to help more people! Hence the beginning of Garden Project Academy...
Welcome to
Garden Project Academy!
Offering online courses and resources to help you have a successful gardening or landscaping project. A landscape design project is an incredible opportunity to make the world a better place, by starting in your own backyard.
Check out FREE resources, like the YouTube channel, and the mini course: How to Choose the Perfect Plant.
I also offer a paid online course, Design-Your-Own Landscape Layout, which guides you through the process of creating a hand-drawn, to-scale plan for your dream yard (even if you are a beginner).
While I've been designing landscapes and teaching workshops for years, this online course business is new... You're here at the very beginning! Please let me know what you want to see next, and follow the journey by subscribing to the Garden Project Academy newsletter. It's the best way to stay involved if you want to hear when new resources are available for you.
There are many ways that plants and design can make the world a better place.
Through Garden Project Academy, I hope to share resources and inspiration to make it easier for you to make the world a better place, by starting in your own garden. Our actions add up to a magnified positive impact.
There are so many positive actions to take, it's hard to know where to start. For now, I'm here to help you with LANDSCAPE DESIGN, because:
Don't have somewhere to dig? Just for now, these online design resources do mostly focus on garden projects for people with access to soil, but please stay tuned! This is just the beginning. Apartment, indoor, and community gardening resources are cooking.
If you would like to share ideas for future offerings, please let me know what I can do to help!
Follow for gardening resources and to stay in the loop:
Want to start learning? Here are some ways I can help!
Learn the steps to proper plant selection (how to put the right plant in the right place) in this on-demand, one-hour, online mini course
Yes, you can design your own landscape! This online course guides you step by step you through the design process
Subscribe to this new and growing channel that features landscape design fundamentals, tips, and tricks for successful beginnings.
Join my email newsletter to stay in the loop about upcoming events, new free resources, and more, to help you with your garden project!
How I Learned About Plants
I've been gardening since I was 13, when I borrowed a gardening book from the library, and fell in love.
This passion led me to train to be one of my state's youngest University Extension Master Gardeners at the age of 15. I volunteered as a Master Gardener at plant sales, events, classes, and conferences: I learned that there are many different ways that plants and gardening can create positive impacts.
Now, I'm also a Certified Professional Horticulturalist (by the Washington State Nursery & Landscaping Association). This essentially means I passed my state’s horticultural equivalent to the “bar exam,” so I can officially call myself a Horticultural professional.
In 2015, a friend asked me to design their yard. I did, they loved it, and it occurred to me: I could do this as a job!
Years of designing, consulting, and teaching in-person workshops followed.
I quickly found that a good landscape designer acted as more of a guide or an educator. I could know everything in the world about plants, but I would have been a useless designer without developing systems for helping my clients articulate their dreams, learn from their landscape, and plan to bring it to life.
The hardest part of being a landscape designer? Time being a limitation! Waitlists are challenging to pace when every job is different, and scheduling is exhausting. I began researching solutions... and the idea for Garden Project Academy came to life.
Online courses create an opportunity for artfully crafted education and empowerment like never before, and I can't wait to bring so many incredible resources to life to help you with your yard.
I am excited to have just started Garden Project Academy, offering online courses, design resources, and inspiration to make it easier for you to make the world a better place, starting with projects in your own backyard.
Stay in the Loop
Follow the journey of Garden Project Academy, and learn about gardening & landscape design along the way!
I use the term “backyard” a lot. I'll use it in the next header, below! It is likely what you are here for help with.
I feel the weight of the fact that the concept of a "backyard" ("a patch of land we own") represents a cultural construct with complex history. My ancestors colonized the land I garden on. Specifically, the lands of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, and the Cowlitz Indian Tribe. (If you do not know whose land you garden on, you can learn more here). I have learned that my culture is wrong to believe land is something that should be "owned," and should instead be considered a shared and sacred resource.
With a knot in my stomach and a broken heart, I find myself helping someone decide how to design their backyard, after they must remove the "Western Red Cedars" that are dying from the heat and dryness caused by climate change. How do I treat this like an opportunity? What can I do to help?
I hope that through Garden Project Academy, I can help you make the world a better place through plants, wherever you are digging. What can we do in our backyards to help others? To work toward solutions? To learn? What can we do beyond our backyards? This is a brand new business, and I learn so much every day. I am learning how to create online courses, how to optimize YouTube videos for SEO, and how to fix website glitches. I am learning from others and their experiences. I am always learning what we can do with the tools and resources we have. I am always learning what Garden Project Academy can do to help.
Your Backyard is an Opportunity
Did you know that a study done back in 2005 found lawn to be the largest irrigated crop cultivated in the USA? I couldn’t tell you how it’s changed since then, and also, there are larger unirrigated crops...
However, I am sharing this to demonstrate something so important:
The actions we take add up.
Lawn is often considered unremarkable. Unless you are a passionate lawn lover, you probably don't dedicate much mental energy to your lawn. Your kids or pets may enjoy it. You take care of it.
But consider this: just our lawns can add up to what is perhaps still THE LARGEST IRRIGATED CROP IN THE USA.
It is a small part of many people's daily lives. But it demonstrates something so important: Our everyday actions can add up to a significant positive or negative impact. Including the actions in your yard.
We need to take big actions, too. We're facing big problems as a world.
But you can still do something small. Because small things are also important: they add up.
This applies to all areas of life, of course, but we're here to talk about gardening and landscape design.
Ask yourself, "If everyone did this in their yard, would it make the world a better or worse place?"
The actions you take in your own backyard can add up to magnify good things.